Disillusionment can hurt like a bullet. Delhi-based journalist Mihir Srivastava would only know better. After years of being subservient to what he thought were agenda-driven news organisations, which batted only for a certain establishment, Srivastava saw little hope for himself or his fraternity. "I felt that we [the media] were becoming propagandist," he shares, over a telephonic interview. Instead of wallowing in discontentment, Srivastava decided to channelise it into something more productive: Travel.

For over a year, he and photojournalist Raul Irani set out each weekend from Delhi, into the hinterlands of Uttar Pradesh. On their map were destinations that had been in the eye of political and media storms. Kairana, for instance. The small dusty, Muslim-dominated town in Shamli district in western Uttar Pradesh, was said to have experienced a mass exodus of Hindu families. The reason: threats and extortion by criminal elements from a certain community. There was also Sarawaha, a village in Meerut, which was at the centre of the love jihad controversy—an 18-year-old Hindu teacher Shallu Tyagi was said to have been allegedly kidnapped and gangraped, and forced into marrying a Muslim man, Kalim.